Block YouTube in general, but allow videos from specific YouTube channels?

[scottsander]

We have YouTube blocked in our organization and allow access for individuals to it (the entire service) based on business need and director approval via User-ID and membership in a specific AD group.

Now one arm of our organization (that has access to YouTube, of course) has decided that it is a good idea to create a YouTube channel and has asked IT to allow access for all employees to be able to access this channel.

I am trying to ascertain whether or not this is possible.  TLS decryption is a given, and we already have the capability to do that.  From what I can tell, channels do have unique URLs, but the videos hosted on a channel don't seem to have a URL that is related to the channel at all.  This would mean that we would indeed whitelist the channel but we'd also have to whitelist each individual video separately as well.

Is anyone aware of a way to allow access to all videos on a single YouTube channel without having to try to maintain a list of individual YouTube video URLs too?

[Brandon_Wertz]

Here is a thread on the same topic:

https://live.paloaltonetworks.com/t5/General-Topics/Blocking-YouTube-channel-looking-for-working-sol...

[it-thomas]

Having worked on web proxies and URL filters for a while now, you would have to add each individual URL to the list.  Youtube does not appear to add any type of tag in the URL to the video that designatates the coorelation to the channel.  Maybe you could write a custom appID that looks for the author tag in the HTML (example: "author":"channel ID") or something along those lines.

To be honest, the dedicated web proxies that I have worked on do not even allow you to do this.  Some of them allow you to open a categorization (i.e. music, education, etc) but videos related to a specific channel required a custom list.

[scottsander]

This was my suspicion.

What is it with Google making things so difficult for web filtering admins (thinking also of SafeSearch enforcement)?

[xhoms]

An article describing how to achieve this goal with the experimental MineMeld miner at https://github.com/PaloAltoNetworks/youtube-miner is available at Filtering YouTube videos to only approved playlists

[scottsander]

Thanks for that article.  Very interesting.  Is there some way to make this work for YouTube channels as well as playlists?  I have a requirement to allow everyone in the organization access to a specific YouTube channel, not a playlist.

[xhoms]

The current (experimental) class at https://github.com/PaloAltoNetworks/youtube-miner only collects videos from playlists. But is looks quite easy to add a new class to use the Search:list method of the YouTube Data API v3 to collect videos from a channel. Let me know if you want to give it a try. Otherwise I'll add this task to my queue list.